Accounting, hybrids and the management of risk

The hybridising of financial and service expertise in English local authority budget control

“…An important contribution of the budget roles literature (Wildavsky, 1964(Wildavsky, , 1975 concerned the blurring of the strict role separation between guardians and advocates by introducing the notion of attitudes (Imbeau, 2002). Meanwhile the accountability literature highlighted the complexities of inserting financial expertise into public management practices and, specifically, pointed towards some of the unintended consequences of hybridised expertise (Fischer and Ferlie, 2013;Miller et al, 2008). Neither stream of research, however, had worked on the trajectories through which specific practice components could evolve to give rise to the particular forms of intertwining that would help to create hybrid expertises in new meshes of practices (Schatzki, 2002).…”

“…In this paper we conceive of those complexities as arising from the historical trajectories on which practices and arrangements intermingle. Our focus on practices follows the literature on the hybridisation of expertise in the public sector, which has emphasised the significance of practices, rather than organisational units, for understanding this phenomenon (Kurunmäki and Miller, 2011;Miller et al, 2008).…”

“…A key contribution of the accountability literature has been the notion of a hybridising of different forms of expertise in the process of satisfying demands for accountability (Miller et al, 2008). For example, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK determines whether a drug is made available to National Health Service (NHS) patients based on concepts such as "cost per quality-adjusted life years" relative to gains in "quality-adjusted life years" (p. 960).…”

“…Frequently this issue has been conceptualised in terms of the relationship between accounting and various other forms of expertise, notably those found in the health sector (Kurunmäki, 1999;Llewellyn and Northcott, 2005), social services (Bracci, 2014;Llewellyn, 1998), and education (Ezzamel et al, 2012;Oakes and Berry, 2009), all of which represent significant shares of public expenditure. The nature of the relationship between accounting and other forms of expertise has inspired different theoretical positions: Whereas some scholars have emphasised the potential of accounting to dominate the expertise and ethos that used to underpin public services (Alam and Lawrence, 2009;Broadbent and Laughlin, 1998;Laughlin and Broadbent, 1993;Mennicken, 2013), others have highlighted the complexities of the interaction between accounting and other forms of expertise (Bracci, 2014;Llewellyn, 1998;Mutiganda, 2014), and the various ways in which they might hybridise (Kurunmäki, 2004;Kurunmäki and Miller, 2011;Miller et al, 2008). …”

Hybridity as a process of technology's ‘translation’: Customizing a national Electronic Patient Record

“…Some suggest that hybridity is a combination of existing entities that are typically found separately (Battilana & Dorado, 2010;Bloomfield & Hayes, 2009;Miller et al, 2008). Metaphors such as 'layered hybridity' and 'grafted hybridity' have been used to illustrate hybridity as a process of bringing together different elements in varied ways (Bloomfield & Hayes, 2009).…”